Global Policy Forum

by Lim Li Lin and Chee Yoke Heong

As controversy brews over the environmental and health impacts of ‘biopharm crops', crop plants that are genetically engineered, especially to produce substances such as pharmaceuticals, moves are being made to broker contract deals over the Internet targeting farmers especially in the Third World to grow pharm crops.

Beth Burrows, President and Director of the Edmonds Institute, discovered a website based in Europe that seeks to enlist farmers to contract out their land, if it is in the ‘right location and conditions' to pharmaceutical companies at up to 20 times ‘commercial' rates for normal food crops to be used for growing biopharm crops.

Burrows adds, "The web brokers are offering what seems to be a perfect deal. Perfect, until you begin to wonder whether they're not shifting the risk and liability burden from pharmaceutical and manufacturing companies to those much less able to address and bear the potential health, environmental, and legal burdens of (bio) pharm crops."

The website that Burrows mentioned has proudly announced that it now have a few Indian growers. And farmers elsewhere, enticed by the potential profits to be made from such deals as advertised by the website, coupled with the lax and often non-existence of regulations on biopharm crops, are prime targets by such brokers especially as worries over the consequences of contamination by such crops increase in the industrialized world.

In the US, where about 300 open-air field trials are being conducted in secret locations across the US and about 400 biopharm products are reportedly in the pipeline, reports of cases of contamination are emerging.

Of the publicly known contamination that occurred was the discovery last November of corn genetically engineered with pharmaceuticals or chemical products that found its way into soya bean plants in the state of Nebraska. This led the U.S. Agriculture Department to quarantine 500,000 bushels of potentially contaminated soya beans, valued at US$2.7 million, to be eventually destroyed to prevent it from getting into the food system.

Following the discovery, the Department admitted that a similar incident occurred back in September in Iowa involving the contamination by corn unapproved for human consumption of neighbouring corn. As a result, the Department ordered 155 acres of Iowa corn pulled up and incinerated. (see www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A51859-2002Nov13.html).

Voices of concern are already being heard. Ten U.S. food industry groups have urged the government to stop biopharm crops until it implements stricter regulations to prevent accidental contamination of other crops (US food groups urge halt to "bio-pharm" crops, Reuters, February 07, 2003). Similar rumblings are also heard in Europe.

The danger of pharm crops cannot be ignored. Pharm crops are crops that are genetically modified to produce gene products that are pharmaceutically active, and that are not normally produced by the crops concerned. As Prof. Joe Cummins of the Institute of Science in Society reveals below, these plants are potentially dangerous as they can poison our entire food chain.

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